Western sanctions - intention to show their insult in decent ways - Russia ForMin

MOSCOW, March 30, /ITAR-TASS/. Western sanctions are an intention to show their insult in decent ways, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Sunday Time programme anchored by Irada Zeinalova on Russia’s TV Channel One on Sunday.

“As for sanctions, this is the way to a deadlock,” Lavrov noted, adding that “There is a feeling that our Western partners, if taking the situation broadly, have been creating conditions “to tear off” Ukraine from Russia for many years.” “When they realised that they were wrong and made a mistake taking actions that undermine all agreements reached after the Soviet Union breakup they failed to acknowledge this,” he said, adding that “Falsely taken sense of proudness hampered them to do so. All sanction reflexes that we witness now remind us of a striving to show their offence in most decent ways,” the Russian top diplomat said.

“I do not cull words now, because I say this to my partners. In eye-on-eye talks they ask to understand them in all possible ways, to get in their shoes, because “Western community cannot put up with such developments,” that “we understand you, but when all of us are together in community, we should stick to a common position,” the minister said, adding that “This came from the previous epoch, when geopolitical strategic rivals, confronting blocs were involved in the game. The game was played on the principle of “who is not with us, is against us.”

Moscow has given it up a long time ago. “Unfortunately, this mentality still lives in the minds of many politicians who determine Western position nowadays,” the Russian foreign minister said.

“I do not want to say that sanctions are ridiculous or that we do not care about them at all,” he noted, adding that “These are unpleasant things. The fact that they want to take tougher personal sanctions and make them be targeted against someone personally, obviously seeking to bite someone more painfully, is seen by naked eye.” “We are not happy about it, but we do not have painful feelings. We lived even through harder times,” the Russian foreign minister added.

Russia has a quite rich history of relations with Western partners in the post-Soviet epoch. “We were welcome in the democratic camp, proceeding from the assumption that we will salute them and will observe strictly all those rules which the West had formulated in that part of Christian civilisation,” Lavrov noted. “This is not partnership, but a desire to develop geopolitical landscape that was showed in Ukrainian events - an unbridled desire to do quicker what will place Ukraine into “the western orbit” irreversibly without taking into account vital interests of Ukrainian economy, culture, nation that is very complex, multinational and multicultural. The striving to do so that Ukraine will not be with Russia is behind all this. Just remember Zbigniew Brzezniski saying that Russia with Ukraine is a power, but Russia without Ukraine is something smaller.”

In this regard, U.S. President Barack Obama’s statement about Russia as a regional power and that Russia will have to pay for all was offending. “We did not pay with a single human life satisfying legitimate expression of will of Crimean peoples,” Sergey Lavrov said. “The price that the Americans paid for their “games” is measured at thousands of human lives - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yugoslavia. All this has its price, but it is different,” the Russian foreign minister added.